Callista : a Tale of the Third Century

by John Henry Newman

  CHAPTER XVI.

  WORSE AND WORSE.

  "O wretched minds of men! O blind hearts!" truly cries out a great heathenpoet, but on grounds far other than the true ones. The true ground of sucha lamentation is, that men do not interpret the signs of the times and ofthe world as He intends who has placed these signs in the heavens; thatwhen Mane, Thecel, Phares, is written upon the ethereal wall, they have noinward faculty to read them withal; and that when they go elsewhere forone learned in tongues, instead of taking Daniel, who is used to conversewith Angels, they rely on Magi or Chaldeans, who know only the languagesof earth. So it was with the miserable population of Sicca now; halffamished, seized with a pestilence which was sure to rage before itassuaged, perplexed and oppressed by the recoil upon them of thepopulation whom they had from time to time sent out into the surroundingterritory, or from whom they had supplied their markets, they neverfancied that the real cause of the visitation which we have beendescribing was their own iniquity in their Maker's sight, that His arminflicted it, and that its natural and direct interpretation was, "Dopenance, and be converted." On the contrary, they looked only at their ownvain idols, and at the vain rites which these idols demanded, and theythought there was no surer escape from their misery than by upholding alie, and putting down all who revolted from it; and thus the visitationwhich was sent to do them good turned through their wilful blindness totheir greater condemnation.

  The Forum, which at all times was the resort of idleness and dissipation,now became more and more the haunt of famine and sickness, of robustframes without work, of slavish natures virtually and for the timeemancipated and uncontrolled, of youth and passion houseless andshelterless. In groups and companies, in and out of the porticoes, on thesteps of the temples, and about the booths and stalls of the market, amultitude grows day by day, from the town and from the country, and of allthe various races which town and country contain. The civil magistracy andthe civil force to which the peace of the city was committed, were notequal to such an emergency as the present; and the _milites stationarii_,a sort of garrison who represented the Roman power, though they were readyto act against either magistrates or mob impartially, had no tendernessfor either, when in collision with each other. Indeed the bonds of societywere broken, and every political element was at war with every other, in acase of such great common calamity, when every one was angry with everyone else, for want of some clearly defined object against which the commonanger might be discharged with unanimity.

  They had almost given over sacrificing and consulting the flame or theentrails; for no reversal or respite of their sufferings had followedtheir most assiduous acts of deprecation. Moreover the omens weregenerally considered by the priests to have been unpropitious or adverse.A sheep had been discovered to have, instead of a liver, something verylike a gizzard; a sow had chewed and swallowed the flowers with which ithad been embellished for the sacrifice; and a calf, after receiving thefatal blow, instead of lying down and dying, dashed into the temple,dripping blood upon the pavement as it went, and at last fell and expiredjust before the sacred _adytum_. In despair the people took tofortune-telling and its attendant arts. Old crones were found in plentywith their strange rites, the stranger the more welcome. Trenches were dugin by-places for sacrifices to the infernal gods; amulets, rings,counters, tablets, pebbles, nails, bones, feathers, Ephesian or Egyptianlegends, were in request, and raised the hopes, or beguiled and occupiedthe thoughts, of those who else would have been directly dwelling on theirsufferings, present or in prospect.

  Others were occupied, whether they would or no, with diversions fiercerand more earnest. There were continual altercations between farmers, smallproprietors of land, government and city officials,--altercations somanifold and violent, that, even were there no hubbub of voices, and noincoherence of wrath and fear to complicate them, we should despair ofsetting them before the reader. An officer from the camp was expostulatingwith one of the municipal authorities that no corn had been sent thitherfor the last six or seven days, and the functionary attacked had thrownthe blame on the farmer, and he in turn had protested that he could notget cattle to bring the waggons into Sicca; those which he had set outwith had died of exhaustion on the journey. A clerk, as we now speak, inthe _Officium_ of the society of publicans or collectors of _annona_ wasthreatening a number of small tenants with ejection for not sending intheir rated portion of corn for the Roman people:--the _Officium_ of the_Notarius_, or assistant prefect, had written up to Sicca from Carthage inviolent terms; and come it must, though the locusts had eaten up everystack and granary. A number of half-starved peasants had been summoned forpayment of their taxes, and in spite of their ignorance of Latin, they hadbeen made to understand that death was the stern penalty of neglecting tobring the coin. They, on the other hand, by their fierce doggedness ofmanner, seemed to signify by way of answer that death was not a penalty,unless life was a boon.

  The _villicus_ of one of the decurions, who had an estate in theneighbourhood, was laying his miseries before the man of business of hisemployer. "What are we to do?" he said. "Half the gang of slaves is dead,and the other half is so feeble, that I can't get through the work of themonth. We ought to be sheep-shearing; you have no chance of wool. We oughtto be swarming the bees, pressing the honey, boiling and purifying thewax. We ought to be plucking the white leaves of the camomile, andsteeping the golden flowers in oil. We ought to be gathering the wildgrapes, sifting off the flowers, and preserving the residue in honey. Weought to be sowing brassicum, parsley, and coriander against next spring.We ought to be cheese-making. We ought to be baking white and red bricksand tiles in the sun; we have no hands for the purpose. The _villicus_ isnot to blame, but the anger of the gods." The country _employe_ of theprocurator of the imperial _Baphia_ protests that the insect cannot befound from which the dye is extracted; and argues that the locusts musthave devoured them, or the plant on which they feed, or that they havebeen carried off by the pestilence. Here is old Corbulus in agonies forhis febrifuge, and a slave of his is in high words with themarket-carrier, who tells him that Mago, who supplied it, is dead of aworse fever than his master's. "The rogue," cried the slave, "my masterhas contracted with him for the year, and has paid him the money inadvance." A jeering and mocking from the crowd assailed the unfortunatedomestic, who so truly foreboded that his return without the medicinewould be the signal for his summary committal to the _pistrinum_. "Let oldCorbulus follow Mago in his passage to perdition," said one of the rabble;"let him take his physic with Pluto, and leave us the bread and wine onwhich he's grown gouty." "Bread, bread!" was the response elicited by thisdenunciation, and it spread into a circle larger than that of which theslave and the carrier were part.

  "Wine and bread, Ceres and Liber!" cried a young legionary, who, after anight of revelry, was emerging still half-intoxicated from one of the lowwine-shops in the vaults which formed the basement of the _Thermae_ or hotbaths; "make way there, you filthy slime of the earth, you half-kneaded,half-fermented Africans, who never yet have quite been men, but have eversmelt strong of the baboon, who are three quarters _must_, and twovinegar, and a fifth water,--as I was saying, you are like bad liquor, andthe sight of you disagrees with the stomach and affects the eyes."

  The crowd looked sullenly, and without wincing, at his shield, which wasthe only portion of his military accoutrements which he had preservedafter his carouse. The white surface, with a silver boss in the centre,surrounded by first a white and then a red circle, and the purple border,showed that he belonged to the Tertiani or third Italic Legion, which hadbeen stationed in Africa since the time of Augustus. "Vile double-tonguedmongrels," he continued, "what are you fit for but to gather the fruits ofthe earth for your owners and lords, 'Romanos dominos rerum'? And if thereare now no fruits to reap, why your service is gone. Go home and die, anddrown yourselves, for what are you fit for now, except to take your deadcorpses away from the nostrils of a Roman, the cream of
humankind? Yebase-born apes, that's why you catch the pestilence, because our bloodmantles and foams in our ruddy veins like new milk in the wine cup, whichis too strong for this clime, and my blood is up, and I drink a fullmeasure of it to great Rome; for what does old Horace say, but 'Nunc estbibendum'? and so get out of my way."

  To a good part of the multitude, both peasantry and town rabble, Latin wasunintelligible; but they all understood vocabulary and syntax and logic,as soon as he drew his knuckles across one fellow's face who refused tomove from his path, and as soon as his insult was returned by the latterwith a thrust of the dagger. A rush was made upon him, on which he made aface at them, shook his fist, and leaping on one side, ran with greatswiftness to an open space in advance. From his quarrelsome humour ratherthan from fear, he raised a cry of alarm; on which two or threefellow-soldiers made their appearance from similar dens of intoxicationand vice, and came up to the rescue. The mob assailed them with stones,and the cream of human nature was likely to be roughly churned, when,seeing matters were becoming serious, they suddenly took to their heels,and got into the Temple of Esculapius on one side of the Forum. The mobfollowed, the ministers of the sacred place attempted to shut the gates, ascuffle ensued, and a riot was in progress. Self-preservation is the firstlaw of man; trembling for the safety of his noble buildings, andconsidering that it was a bread riot, as it really was, the priest of thegod came forward, rebuked the mob for its impiety, and showed theabsurdity of supposing that there were loaves in his enclosure to satisfyits wants; but he reminded them that there was a baker's shop at the otherend of the Forum, which was one of the most considerable in Sicca.

  A slight impulse determines the movements of an excited multitude. Offthey went to the quarter in question, where certainly there was the verylarge and handsome store of a substantial dealer in grain of all sorts,and in other produce. The shop, however, seemed on this occasion to be butpoorly furnished; for the baker was a prudent man, and feared a display ofprovisions which would be an invitation to a hungry multitude. Theassailants, however, were not to be baffled; some one cried out that theman had withdrawn his corn from the market for his own ends, and thatgreat stores were accumulated within. They avail themselves of the hint;they pour in through the open front, the baker escapes as he may, hismills and ovens are smashed, the house is ransacked; whatever is found isseized, thrown about, wasted, eaten, as the case may be; and the mob gainsstrength and appetite for fresh exploits.

  However, the rioters have no definite plan of action yet. Some of themhave penetrated into the stable behind the house in search of corn. Theyfind the mill-ass which ground for the baker, and bring it out. It is abeast of more than ordinary pretensions, such as you would not often seein a mill, showing both the wealth of the owner and the flourishingcondition of his trade. The asses of Africa are finer than those in thenorth; but this is fine for an African. One fellow mounts upon it, andsets off with the world before him, like a knight-errant, seeking anadventure, the rabble at his tail acting as squire. He begins the circuitof the Forum, and picks up its riff-raff as he goes along--here some rascalboys, there some drunken women, here again a number of half-brutalizedcountry slaves and peasants. Partly out of curiosity, partly fromidleness, from ill temper, from hope of spoil, from a vague desire to bedoing something or other, every one who has nothing to lose by theadventure crowds around and behind him. And on the contrary, as headvances, and the noise and commotion increase, every one who has aposition of any sort, the confidential _vernae_ of great families, farmers,shopkeepers, men of business, officials, vanish from the scene of actionwithout delay.

  "Africa, Africa!" is now the cry; the signal in that country, as anancient writer tells us, that the parties raising it have something new inhand, and have a mind to do it.

  Suddenly, as they march on, a low and awful growl is heard. It comes fromthe booth of a servant of the imperial court. He is employed as atransporter of wild beasts from the interior to the coast, where they areshipped for Rome; and he has charge at present of a noble lion, who issitting majestically, looking through the bars of his cage at the rabble,who now begin to look at him. In demeanour and in mental endowments he hasthe advantage of them. It was at this moment, while they were closing,hustling each other, staring at the beast, and hoping to provoke him, thata shrill voice cried out, "Christianos ad leones, Christianos ad leones!"the Christians to the lions! A sudden and dead silence ensued, as if thewords had struck the breath out of the promiscuous throng. An intervalpassed; and then the same voice was heard again, "Christianos ad leones!"This time the whole Forum took it up from one end to the other. The fateof the day, the direction of the movement, was decided; a distinct objectwas obtained, and the only wonder was that the multitude had been so longto seek and so slow to find so obvious a cause of their misfortunes, soadequate a subject of their vengeance. "Christianos ad leones!" wasshouted out by town and country, priests and people. "Long live theemperor! long live Decius! he told us this long ago. There's the edict; itnever has been obeyed. Death to the magistrates! To the Christians! to theChristians! Up with great Jove, down with the atheists!"

  They were commencing their march when the ass caught their eye. "TheChristians' god!" they shouted out; "the god of the Christians!" Theirfirst impulse was to give the poor beast to the lion, their next tosacrifice it, but they did not know to whom. Then they said they wouldmake the Christians worship it; and dressing it up in tawdry finery, theyretained it at the head of their procession.